Re: A Test of Reading Comprehension, Paul Krugman, Think Progress, and "distorting."; by Jason Lee Steorts

http://thinkprogress.org/
Key Fact In National Review's Global Warming Article Is 'Completely Wrong'
In the June 5 global warming cover story in the print edition of the
National Review, scientist Curt Davis said author Jason Steorts completely
misrepresented his study to argue that Antartica gained ice between 1992 and
2003. Steorts now maintains he omitted the fact that Davis' study only
covered the eastern interior of the continent - and did not consider the
western and costal areas that other studies show are losing mass at a rapid
pace - "for the sake of brevity."

In his cover story, Steorts then references a study by Isabella Velicogna
that examined the whole continent from 2002 to 2005 and found is was losing
substantial amounts of ice. But Steorts provides this rebuttal:

2002 - the year in which the study began - was a high-water mark for
Antarctic ice, so it's not too surprising to see some decline since then.
Alarmism over Velicogna's study is on the order of going to the beach at
high tide, drawing a line at the water's edge, and fretting a few hours
later that the oceans are drying up.

The original article does not provide a source for the claim that 2002 "was
a high-water mark for Antarctic ice" but in an online piece today Steorts
said that he was told that information from the CATO Institute's Patrick
Michaels.

ThinkProgress talked to Patrick Michaels this afternoon. Michaels said he
was referring to a graph in the study by Curt Davis. ThinkProgress then
called Curt Davis. Here is what he had to say:

If Michaels is using my study to claim that 2002 was a high water mark in
terms of ice for all Antartica, that is completely wrong. My study result
only demonstrated this for the interior of East Antarctica. You can't use
that for Antartica as a whole because the coastal areas of the ice ***
were not included in my analysis. My study clearly stated that the overall
mass balance of the Antarctic ice *** depends on the sum of the
contributions from the interior and coastal areas.

So it's the same shell game again. Take a finding for the interior of the
eastern part of the continent and pretend the whole continent is gaining
ice, even though studies show the western and coastal areas are losing ice
at a rapid pace.

Steorts now claims these serious factual errors are immaterial. In his most
recent online commentary, Steorts says his article "hinges neither on the
question whether Antarctica is presently gaining or losing ice." That's odd
considering it was promoted on the cover of the National Review with the
title "Snow Job: The Truth About the Great Overhyped Glacier Melt." Seems
like what's happening to the ice is a pretty central point.


"SMBalloon" <smballoon@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2je182h6f6clf4e8donhaq3q2ii30dq6j1@xxxxxxxxxx
The National Review Online
May 30, 2006, 6:37 a.m.

A Test of Reading Comprehension
Paul Krugman, Think Progress, and "distorting."

By Jason Lee Steorts


Paul Krugman needs a course in remedial reading. That's the conclusion
to be drawn from his New York Times column last Friday, in which he
called my NR cover story "Scare of the Century" part of a
"disinformation campaign" about climate change.

Krugman writes that, "as evidence that global warming isn't really
happening," I offer "the fact that some Antarctic ice sheets are
getting thicker." I did indeed note the thickening of Antarctic
ice--about which, more in a moment--but I never claimed "that global
warming isn't really happening." Rather, I wrote that "global average
temperature has risen by about 1 degree Celsius or less since the late
1800s." No serious person on either side of the global-warming debate
questions this. Nor do serious commentators doubt that human activity,
by increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide,
contributes to global warming. I acknowledged all of these points.

What's in contention, scientifically, is how much of the warming we've
seen so far is a consequence of human activity (as opposed to natural
climate variation), and how much warming human activity will cause in
the future. The policy debate focuses on how dangerous the warming is,
what we can do to stop it, and whether doing so is worth the economic
price we would pay. My article considered these questions, addressing
in particular the oft-repeated claim that man-made global warming will
melt the polar ice caps, raise sea levels, and flood the coasts. If
Krugman wishes to know what I actually wrote instead of putting words
in my mouth that are flatly contradicted by what I wrote, he is
welcome to go back and read my article.

But let's consider the one claim Krugman specifically addresses: that
"some Antarctic ice sheets are getting thicker." His counterargument
is that Curt Davis--whose study of Antarctic ice I cited--is
displeased with the way the Competitive Enterprise Institute has used
his work in television ads about global warming. "[Davis] points out,"
writes Krugman, "that an initial increase in the thickness of
Antarctica's interior ice sheets is a predicted consequence of a
warming planet, so that his results actually support global warming
rather than refuting it."

I have not seen the TV ads, and cannot say whether they distort
Davis's work. My article does not. Not only did I acknowledge that the
planet has gotten warmer, but I explained that warmer water around
Antarctica's coasts has likely caused "more surface evaporation,
making for higher humidity and more precipitation" in the continent's
interior. Of course, the fact that warmer temperatures are causing
greater snowfall proves neither that this phenomenon is harmful nor
that human activity is the primary cause of it. I offered a variety of
reasons to think that 1) the ice caps aren't melting fast enough to
produce a threatening rise in sea levels and 2) the melt we are seeing
can be explained largely as a result of natural climate variation.
Krugman offers no response to any of this.

Studying Davis
Concerning the Curt Davis study, let me make a few additional points
now lest someone else falsely accuse me of misrepresenting his work.
Davis has three objections to the way his study has been cited in the
TV ads. One is the complaint Krugman mentions, and to which I've just
replied.

The second--as summarized by a press release from his university--is
that the study "only reported growth for the East Antarctic ice ***,
not the entire Antarctic ice ***." Davis used satellites to measure
changes in the surface elevation of about 70 percent of the Antarctic
ice *** between 1992 and 2003. He then calculated how much ice the
areas he was looking at had gained or lost during that period. He
found that about 7.3 million square kilometers of the East Antarctic
ice *** were rising by about 1.8 cm per year--which amounts to
roughly 45 billion metric tons. That's enough to lower global sea
levels by 0.12 millimeters per year. In the context of discussing the
snowfall-driven ice build-up, I cited those figures without specifying
that they applied only to East Antarctica. But anyone who wishes to
accuse me of leading readers astray should note that, when you add in
the study areas that lost ice, you still find that the total
area--about 8.5 million square kilometers--gained an average of 1.4 cm
per year in elevation. That's about 41.7 billion cubic tons--enough to
lower sea levels by 0.1156 millimeters per year. Discerning readers
will note that this rounds up nicely to . . . 0.12 millimeters, the
number I used. Some distortion.

Davis's third objection to the TV ads is that the study only noted
growth "on the interior of the ice ***" and "did not include coastal
areas, . . . which are known to be losing mass." These losses "could
offset or even outweigh the gains in the interior areas." But Davis's
study also didn't look at a large section of the ice *** around the
South Pole, owing to the fact that the satellites' orbits prevented
them from "seeing" there. (For a map showing Davis's study area, go
here and scroll down the page.) Since this unstudied area lies in the
ice ***'s interior, it almost certainly gained ice over the course
of the study, and would accordingly have offset the (also unmeasured)
coastal loss. (The study notes that its estimate of ice build-up is
"conservative" for this very reason.) Of course, guesses about what
was happening in the areas Davis didn't study are just that-guesses.
They do not change what we know: that the vast majority of the ice
*** was, on balance, growing between 1992 and 2003.

In any case, the paragraph following my mention of Davis's work cited
a more recent study providing evidence that there has been a net loss
of ice in Antarctica over the past three years. This is something I
surely would not have done had I decided to ignore facts that
presented obstacles to my argument. Indeed, I gave evidence to think
that both Greenland and Antarctica are presently losing ice. The point
of my article was never to deny this, but rather to argue that we
cannot say with certainty that the loss is either a serious threat or
primarily the result of human activity.

Who's Thinking?
So much for Krugman. Equally baseless criticisms of my piece have come
from the liberal web publication Think Progress, which says that my
article contains "several serious errors and omissions" and that I am
guilty of "distorting evidence" and "mislead[ing my] readers." Think
Progress accordingly published a "debunk" that is nothing of the sort.
Let's consider it point by point.

In response to my claim that "there is wide disagreement about the
extent to which carbon-dioxide emissions are responsible for the
warming we've seen so far," Think Progress says that the U.S. Climate
Change Science Program has "concluded that humans are driving the
warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting that 'the
observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained
by natural processes alone.'" It also says that "Science Magazine
[sic] analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming"
and found that "not a single one challenged the scientific consensus
the [sic] earth's temperature is rising due to human activity."

May I encourage whoever wrote the "debunk" to familiarize himself with
the meaning of the word "extent." As I have already explained, nothing
in my article denied that human activity is causing global warming to
one degree or another. What I said was that there is no agreement
about "the extent to which" human activities, as opposed to natural
processes, are to blame. What Think Progress says about the U.S.
Climate Change Science Program and the Science analysis of
peer-reviewed papers does nothing to settle that question.

Think Progress also quotes a 2002 EPA report saying that warming "has
been particularly strong within the past 20 years" and is "due mostly
to human activities." But one EPA report does not settle the
scientific question, nor does it prove that scientists regard the
question as settled. The report acknowledges uncertainties about the
extent of natural climate variation and the ability of models to
simulate climate change, but Think Progress doesn't bother to quote
those parts. Moreover, the report's comments about the role of human
activity in global warming are based on the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change's models, which have long made unrealistic assumptions
about the degree to which human activity is increasing atmospheric CO2
concentrations. Accordingly, they have tended to overpredict warming.
(Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia notes that the IPCC's
input is 41 percent higher than the observed rate of CO2 increase, and
that even NASA scientist James Hansen--who in many ways embodies the
alarmist view on warming--has said that the IPCC's assumptions may be
"unduly pessimistic.")

Next, Think Progress criticizes me for saying that, "when it's not
even clear that the warming we've seen is hurting us--many argue that
it's a boon, citing its benefits to agriculture and its potential to
make severe climates more hospitable--such draconian solutions [as
implementing the equivalent of 30 Kyoto Protocols, which one scientist
has suggested,] should be unthinkable." It notes a 2001 IPCC report
finding that climate change's "negative health impacts are anticipated
to outweigh positive health impacts." But--again--the IPCC models make
unrealistic assumptions about the speed of climate change, and should
not form the basis of predictions of how bad future warming will be.
In any case, my article did not rule out the possibility that climate
change will have harmful consequences in the future; what I said was
that it isn't clear whether the consequences have been harmful so far.
Even if warming is predominately the result of human activity, and
even if its harms will outweigh its benefits, the question is whether
it will be bad enough to justify the economic castration that
significant greenhouse-gas reductions would require. Think Progress
offers no reason at all to think that it will.

Think Progress also objects to the way I cite a study by Ola
Johannessen. Using satellites, Johannessen measured changes in the
surface elevation of the Greenland ice ***'s interior and found that
it was gaining ice. Think Progress's response is to quote
realclimate.org as saying that "Johanessen et al. were not able to
measure all of the coastal ranges. Indeed, the thinning of the margins
and growth in the interior Greenland [sic] is an expected response to
increased temperatures and more precipitation in a warmer climate.
These results present no contradiction to the accelerated sliding near
the coasts." My article, however, acknowledged ice loss near the
coasts. My point was simply that ice gain in the interior should be
subtracted from loss at the coasts if we want to have a realistic
picture of how much ice Greenland is losing.

The next objection is to my claim that, "if today's temperatures are
causing Greenland's coastal ice to slide into the sea, it must have
been positively galloping there 80 years ago." As evidence, I cited a
study forthcoming in Geophysical Research Letters which finds that
temperatures in Greenland were as warm in the early 20th century as
they are today, and that the rate of warming back then was nearly
twice as fast. That's noteworthy because these temperature changes
happened too early to be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels.
Greenland was warm back then for reasons that had nothing to do with
us--and somehow the ice caps survived. Think Progress's utterly
irrelevant reply is that the last three decades "have seen a sharper
rise in global air temperature than any other period since at least
1860" (italics mine). Global averages are of course less than
illuminating about the effect of climate change on particular regions.
When talking about Greenland, it is generally useful to talk about
Greenland.

Finally, Think Progress makes the same objection concerning Curt
Davis's study that Paul Krugman did, and to which I've already
replied.

In light of all this, it would be easy to accuse Paul Krugman and
Think Progress of "distorting evidence," "misleading readers," and
engaging in a "disinformation campaign." I decline to return their
favor. But I will permit myself the modest suggestion that, in the
future, they strive to have the slightest idea what they are talking
about.

(end of commentary)


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